The Community Tickets settings can be found under Events → Settings. The settings for Community Events are at the top of the page, and Community Tickets settings are below that. We’ve got an overview of the Community Events settings in a separate article. Here we focus on the Community Tickets settings only.
The most important setting for Community Events is the Enable Community Tickets checkbox. You must check this box and save the settings page in order to enable the Community Tickets features and allow community organizers to add tickets to their events.
To allow community members to check guests in and manage them on the front end, enable allow users to edit their submission. See Setting Overview: Community Events for more details.
The rest of the Community Tickets settings define how the plugin works on your site, and are optional.
Allow any user to create tickets: This setting is checked by default and allows any Subscriber to your site access to create events with tickets. Only uncheck this box if you plan to make more complex user capabilities via additional code.
Enable ticket images: Control whether or not community organizers can add an image for event tickets. Submitted images will show in the email ticket.
Default provider: Provider to be used for events created via Community Events. Changing this will only affect new tickets.
Ticket fee type: Select if and how site admin will collect payments from ticket sales. The None option means that no extra fees are charged. Flat Fee is a dollar amount per event ticket within an order, while Percentage is a fraction of the ticket’s total.
The following options will appear if you have selected a Per-ticket fee type other than None:
Fee percentage: Define the percentage of ticket sales money collected by the site admin (e.g. 10% of every ticket sold).
Flat fee: Define the flat fee collected by the site admin per event in an order (e.g. $2 per event in an order).
Fee option defaults: Choose whether you want tickets fees (percentage and/or flat fees) to be included in the listed ticket price, or added on top of the price. For example, say you have an event with $10 tickets and are collecting a $1 flat fee. If you select Include fees in ticket price, ticket buyers will be charged $10 ($9 for the organizer and $1 for the site admin). If you choose the Display fees in addition to subtotal on the Cart page, the ticket buyer will be charged $11 ($10 for the organizer and $1 for the site admin). The extra fee will be shown on the Cart page before the buyer continues to Checkout.
Enable split payments: By default, all of the money earned by ticket sales is collected by the site admin as per the settings established in WooCommerce. It is then up to the admin to distribute profits to the Community organizers as appropriate. If you choose to enable split payments, any money is distributed immediately when a sale is complete. The site admin receives the appropriate fees (as defined in the fee settings) via PayPal, as defined on the Settings page (see below). The Community organizer receives the rest of the money through the PayPal address listed on the user’s Payment Options page. Note that if you do enable split payments, the community organizers will be given the option to adjust the fee option defaults for their events from their Payment Options page.
If you enable split payments, you must also set up a PayPal developer account and App. You’ll then need to fill out the additional fields on the Settings page (PayPal API username, password, client ID, etc.)
Are split payments right for you? We can help you decide. Most importantly, though, you should be aware that this functionality is based on PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API which was recently deprecated. We’re investigating replacements, however, if you do not already and alive, approved Adaptive Payments account then you may no longer be able to acquire one.
Pros:
- As a site admin, you have no responsibility to handle or distribute funds
- Community organizers get paid immediately with no action from the admin
Cons:
- Split payments are more work to set up, and require a PayPal developer account
- Refunds and canceled events are significantly more difficult to handle. Refunds are deducted from the site admin’s total, with nothing taken from the community organizer’s profits.